"Twenty-nine years after his death, [Rockwell] Kent has returned with a vengeance. Not since the height of his pre-McCarthyism popularity has so much of his work been available to the public." —Smithsonian

The 75th anniversary printing of the captivating story of Kent's journey to Tierra del Fuego.

Rockwell Kent is one of America's most famous graphic artists. He was also an avid traveler. Kent was especially fascinated by remote Arctic lands and often stayed for extended periods of time to paint, write, and become acquainted with the local inhabitants. Between 1918 and 1935, he wrote and illustrated several popular books about his travels. Voyaging, originally published in 1924, is the engaging story of Kent's sailing voyage to Tierra del Fuego. Kent is a charming writer and keen observer of both the land and its people. The book is beautifully and generously illustrated with Kent's distinctive woodcuts.

The first edition was published to great critical acclaim. New Republic wrote, "the land lives. A land where roses are as big as sun-flowers, where gales gnaw against bleak cliffs . . . At the end of the earth, there is the paradox of the dwarf and the giant." The Nation said, "Kent has caught the wild beauty of this ominous region -- iron crags ringed with the froth of blown surf, wind-tortured trees, distant peaks incrusted with dazzling snow; but out of the very heart of this bewildering beauty emanates a sense of unseen presences appallingly, implacably hostile to man."

Reviews:

"This is a book filled with roaring winds, black, smoking seas, mountains that are terrible in the isolation they symbolize. Why does the desire persist in men to visit places such as this? What draws them on to certain discomfort, danger and separation from all that civilized effort has won for them? Perhaps Mr. Kent has struck upon the true answer here. 'This hour you are bound by the whole habit of your life and thought, the next by unerring impulse of the soul you are free. How strong and swift is pride to clear itself, from misery or joy, from crowds, from ease, from failure, from success, from the recurrent brim full, the too much? Forever shall man seek the solitudes and the most utter desolation of the wilderness to achieve through hardship the rebirth of his pride.' . . . The strength and menace and majesty of the Cape Horn region proved admirable material for Mr. Kent's black and white drawings. They are not a mere adornment of his book, but an integral part of it."—New York Times

"Rockwell Kent has the Midas knack -- everything his pen touches becomes literary gold. The publication of his 'Wilderness' gave birth to the suspicion that here was a unique figure in the world of letters. With the advent of 'Voyaging' that suspicion becomes a conviction. No other literary artist is doing just what Kent is doing."—New York Tribune

"An account of Mr. Kent's attempt in a tiny sailboat to steer a course from the Strait of Magellan south and west through the mountainous-islanded channels of Tierra del Fuego around Cape Horn. ...Mr. Kent has caught the wild beauty of this ominous region -- iron crags ringed with the froth of blown surf, wind-tortured trees, distant peaks incrusted with dazzling snow; but out of the very heart of this bewildering beauty emanates a sense of unseen presences appallingly, implacably hostile to man."—The Nation

Endorsements:

"To say that Voyaging is the literary equivalent of Rockwell Kent's full-blooded paintings is to damn it with faint praise. It's a book that can easily stand on its own beside any travel narrative of its time or indeed our time. In fact, Voyaging is so fresh and robust that it reads as if it had been written yesterday rather than in the early 1920s."—Lawrence Millman, author of An Evening Among Headhunters and Last Places

Rockwell Kent (1872 - 1971) is perhaps best known for his illustrations for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Moby Dick. Kent also created the "random house" that, despite revision throughout the years, has been the colophon of that company since its inception in 1928. Kent's other travel books include N by E, Wilderness, and A Northern Christmas, all reissued by Wesleyan.